Making Sense with Sam Harris - #349 — Generosity, Cynicism, and the Future of Doing Good

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Chris Anderson about generosity in the age of the Internet. They talk about the new spirit of cynicism in tech and finance, the problems with DEI, the Coleman Hughes controversy at TED, the norm of color blindness, the science of generosity, the leverage of the Internet, the false opposition between selfishness and selflessness, mixed motives in giving, results vs reward, the importance of intentions, looking for the good in people, digital business models, the economics of TED, TEDx, wealth inequality, the ethics of billionaires, philanthropy at scale, the power of pledges, the arguments of Peter Singer, the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal, problems with Effective Altruism, how to improve our digital lives, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Chris Anderson. Chris has been the curator of the famous TED conference since 2001. The tagline of TED is Ideas Worth Spreading, of which there have been many first shared at TED. The title of his new book is Infectious Generosity, the Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading. And that is in part the topic of today's conversation. We talk about the new spirit of cynicism that seems to surround any notion of doing good in the world, in tech and finance at the moment, the problems with diversity, equity, and inclusion,

DEI, the controversy that enveloped Coleman Hughes when he spoke at TED last year. And then we get into the topic of Chris's book, Proper. We talk about the science of generosity, the leverage offered by the internet, the false opposition between selfishness and selflessness, mixed motives in giving, results versus reward, trying to see the good in people, digital business models, including my own business model for this podcast, the economics of TED, TEDx, wealth inequality, the ethics of billionaires, philanthropy at scale,

the power of pledges, the arguments of Peter Singer, the Sam Bankman Freed scandal, and the problems with effective altruism, how to improve our digital lives, and other topics. Is there a more important topic than trying to figure out how to inspire the luckiest among us to do more good in the world? Given the implications, I'm not sure. And now I bring you Chris Anderson. I am here with Chris Anderson. Chris, thanks for joining me. It's great to be here, Sam. So you have a new book, Infectious Generosity,

The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading, which I want to talk about, which it seems like now is the moment for such a book. It's really great that you've written this. But most people will know you as the owner and curator and impresario of the TED conference. What did you do professionally before TED? I was a journalist out of university. I think I originally wanted to be a physics professor, but I found physics very hard at Oxford and switched course partway through to politics and philosophy and ended up as a journalist. And then fell in love with computers in the early

1980s and started a magazine publishing company for, you know, hobbyist, nerdy computer mags, which turned out to be very fortunate timing. And, you know, the company did well, came to America eventually, continued to grow it, and then had a horrible tangle with the dot-com crash of 2000, 2001. Ended up leaving the company, which had gone public by this stage, but left it and did the sideways move into TED, which was a conference I'd first went to in 1998 and kind of fell in love with it and had a chance, surprisingly, to buy it from the owner. I didn't have any money because of the dot-com bust, but I did have a foundation. So it was the foundation that bought TED. And so it found itself in a nonprofit. And that's been most of my time since then, really since 2001.

When you say you had a horrible tangle with the dot-com bust, were you one of these people who had a billion dollars on paper and then watched it get halved every 15 minutes until it vanished over the course of a day? I mean, was it that kind of experience or what exactly happened? Pretty much. I'm not sure I quite, maybe for five minutes after one company went public, hit the billion mark, but it very quickly fell away. And yeah, for 18 months, I basically lost on average a million dollars a day. And it was, it's not just that it, I mean, it really eats at your, your sort of self of sense of self-worth. I mean, like, because I'd told this fantasy to myself that

I was a, this, you know, successful entrepreneur, everything had always gone up into the right. And you know, the company for years, the company kind of doubled in size every year and it just felt, you know, easy and great. And then this happened and it was a real lesson really. Don't tie up too much of your happiness and sense of self-worth into your business or what you do. It's a recipe for disappointment. kind of got, survived it, I think, by reading and getting, just entering, remembering how amazing the world of ideas is and how much cool science was happening. I hadn't really discovered evolutionary biology. There were so many things that I got into for the first time. And that made the prospect of a move into TED and sort of living in that world incredibly appealing. I mean, at the time, it was an annual conference, nothing else. But hey, all these interesting people, and it felt like a real respite from the ugliness of the dot-com crash, where I had 2,000 people at one

point. We had to let go half of them, and it was just so painful. It was a horrible time. Well, I want to talk about wealth and philanthropy and all these intersecting issues. I mean, Ted has given you a front row seat to see the social phenomenon I want to discuss, and many of which relate to the topic of your book, which is briefly, you've written a book about how we can do more good in the world through leveraging new norms around generosity, and especially as becomes possible in the age of the internet. I mean, really, it changes the possibility of being generous in interesting ways. But before we jump into that, I want to acknowledge that there's this new spirit of cynicism in the air, wherein it seems that almost any conspicuous efforts to do good in the world

now seem suspect. And this relates to various degrees to things like ESG, environmental, social, and governance investing, effective altruism, DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. And there's this sense, especially among influential people in tech and in finance, that all of this stuff amounts to a little more than a sanctimonious scam. It's all just virtue signaling. It's just elites marketing to elites. And I've been critical of many of these things, and I'm actually especially critical of DEI at the moment. But I'm also worried that what we have here is a situation in which some of the luckiest and smartest people in

the world appear to have drawn the wrong lesson from some specific recent embarrassments. And they appear to now think that altruism and generosity and compassion are basically bogus, and we're all just condemned to live in a world where we play this game for ourselves. And, you know, perhaps our family and a few friends make it into the lifeboat with us. But otherwise, we should just be narrowly selfish without apology. And in fact, there's an attraction to this. I mean, really, the apotheosis of this is someone like Trump, where, you know, where you have half the country idolizing a man who makes no pretense of being other than malignantly selfish, right? And if you can be just nakedly selfish and merely selfish, one of the superpowers you acquire is

that it's impossible to be a hypocrite. And it's the moments of hypocrisy that many people have found so despicable in our efforts to do good. So you have someone like Sam Bankman Freed, or you have the DEI bureaucrats who are apparently unable to condemn calls for genocide against the Jews. It's just very easy to see what is wrong here. I'm thinking of one with respect to ESG now. I guess you had the spectacle of lots of right-thinking people flying on their private jets to a climate conference, right? And so people see this, and now they've begun to default to a new norm of cynicism and selfishness. And so I want to talk about the problems such as they are with ESG and effective altruism and DEI and these other issues. But I'm wondering

if you share my concern that the pendulum is in the process of swinging back into something like an Ayn Randian and fairly psychopathic ethic of basically no social responsibility. Yeah, I think you're right to be concerned. I'm certainly worried about it. I think different people would probably tell the story in different ways, but there's no question that the techno-optimism of, say, the early 2000s, when it really seemed like you could frame the internet, for example, as bringing the world together. Lots of people had the narrative that, wow, this is wonderful. We can see people on the other side of the world. Maybe this exciting new technology can spread things like freedom and democracy and some of the ideas that we care about. And the narrative of the last 10 years

has been the opposite of that. And I've felt it And I felt it through my ringside seat at TED, if you like, of this growing sort of sense of crushing disappointment that the Internet was not doing what we thought it would do. It was actually helping engender the opposite. And yeah, somewhere around the rise of social media, the election of Donald Trump, the world became very, very, very divided. And it was almost the only thing you could be was to pick a tribe and then fight and be really annoyed at the other side. And those were the most sort of fervent conversations. sort of fervent conversations. I mean, I think, and I hope, that a lot of people have got really sick at how mean the world has become. And actually, you're right that there is a lot of cynicism and exhaustion. The way I would frame it, Sam, I think is almost the language that each side has sort of fallen into. So the language of DEI has become its own sort of sing-song thing that is almost

invisible to the people who are in it. And it just sounds so exhausting and mind-numbing and annoying to people who aren't. And it makes it impossible to have actually a conversation about the real things that are underlying it. The reason why DEI happened originally was that there were injustices in the world and that there were groups of people who hadn't been given a fair shot and there was a need and a desire from good thinking people to try to do something about that. But it warped into tribalistic language. That's the shocker. So that you couldn't even have a discussion about the actual merits of the case. It was just, oh, you use that word. I know who you are. I can't talk to you. You make me sick.

And it's sort of, I think and I hope that there are a lot of people who have got really weary of that world and that there's a desire, and certainly in the next, in the generation coming through, but I think in our generation as well, that this can't go on. And I, you know, part of my sense of urgency about this is if we can't figure out how to start listening to each other, talking to each other, working together, collaborating, we're not going to be able to solve any of the giant problems that the future is sort of throwing up. And, you know, whether it's climate, whether it's wars around the world, you know, whether it's artificial intelligence and the challenges that that poses, we're not going to be able to solve any of this online in the last decade, especially fear,

resentment, disgust, anger, it is also possible for really good things to go viral. There is no reason why they shouldn't. And with a bit of a nudge and a bit of a rethink and an effort by people of goodwill, I think there just might be a chance to turn the tide. At least that's the ambition. And if we don't do this, I don't know what else we do because the future is just going to be so ugly. Well, I had thought to save a discussion of DEI to the end, but since we've touched on it on the fly, I think maybe we'll just take a brief detour and talk about it because it is a bit of a sidebar discussion with respect to the other topics that relate directly to generosity and philanthropy and wealth, etc. I've always viewed you, before I came to know you at all, as a kind of prisoner of sorts of Ted with respect to DEI.

Perhaps you had a bit of Stockholm syndrome too, I don't know, but it just seemed like... Actually, the first moment I noticed this was after I gave my first TED Talk, where I took a pretty hard line against traditional Islam, in particular, the compulsory veiling of women. And you came up on stage afterwards and tried to perform a bit of an intervention. And people can watch that on YouTube and draw their own conclusions. And you and I have since talked a fair amount about Islam and my approach to criticizing it, as well as my approach to criticizing religion in general. And we've hashed that out on your podcast and in private. So we don't have to rehash that here unless you

feel free to say anything you want and edify me in front of my audience here, but it's been useful to talk to you about all that. But what I want to talk about is a recent event that had somewhat the same character, but was notable in that it revealed how much had changed in the intervening years. So when we first met, when I gave that first TED Talk, I think that was 2010. And so now, a decade plus hence, you have an event which produces much more controversy. And yet the target of the blowback was, to my eye, far more anodyne than I was giving that first TED Talk. In fact, it made me think that there's no way I could have given that TED Talk now, or at least last year. And so, Neil, Sam, I'm talking about the case of Coleman Hughes. What happened there? What was your perception of what happened there? I wasn't actually at that conference. I wasn't there for the immediate, to see the immediate dominoes fall, but I just heard about it after the fact.

What was your experience of that? So just two words on your own TED Talk. I actually really liked your TED Talk. What I was there, I was the person who came up on stage there. It was nothing to do, I think, with DEI. This was a person who had lived for years as a kid growing up in Afghanistan and Pakistan with a lot of Muslims. And I do dislike huge aspects of actually lots of religions. And I think living for, you know, paradise rather than the current world is incredibly, incredibly dangerous. I think the whole inshallah, you know, it can be a very disempowering way to live where people give up trying because they just, you know, God will do whatever he will do. There's lots that I don't like, but what I do like is that

there are some genuinely, I just got to know many super spiritual Muslims and many Muslim women who actually liked aspects of the conservatism of Muslim culture and preferred it to the sort of, of the conservatism of Muslim culture and preferred it to the sort of, you know, the excesses of the West, if you like, the excessive public sexuality of the West. So it was a kind of ex-missionary kid, if you like, coming and speaking and challenging you. But the core of what you said in that talk was incredible, Sam. I mean, the notion of building morality from the ground up based on science, based on what we know about human nature. I mean, I think that's, I actually believe that because that's what opens the door to moral progress, which I think is a real thing. I think cultural relativism is a disastrous philosophy. And so we probably had more in line than you thought, but I was probably aware of,

you know, some Muslims in the audience and just wanted to look out for them. Okay. So Coleman Hughes. So the narrative online in some, you know, depending on whether you look on the left or on the right, one narrative is that we, you know, invited a controversial man to TED to give a talk about, he made the case for colorblindness. On the left, this is seen as super controversial and also deeply upsetting to some people because on the left, the view is that colorblind policies over decades have been proven not to work. We're still here with a lot of racial injustice and that you cannot make enough progress without proactively making decisions based on race in some cases. There's a very good TED talk, I think, by Melody Hobson arguing exactly for this, be color bold, not color blind. And she actually persuaded me to be more conscious in how we hired. It's not about

tokenistic hiring. It's about just making extra effort to find great people and that with a more diverse employee base, you actually get a lot more done and it's just healthier all around. So I get that argument from the left. And I also get why, you know, what happened when Coleman gave his talk is that some people heard it as, you no longer care about my identity. And so some people in the community were really upset by it, it's true to say. That meant that we had some people internally were troubled at the notion of pushing it out online and wondered whether we should, whether it really was an idea we're spreading. And they felt that some of the issues sort of really needed further debate,

given how sensitive it was. So Coleman kindly agreed to do a debate. And he did, I thought he did very well in it. And that was posted and that was fine. And then we posted his talk and all well and good so far. The talk was not included in one of our super popular podcasts for a while. I think the team were uncomfortable with it for whatever reason. I actually wasn't really aware of this, but it meant that the view count on Coleman's talk was low compared with other talks. And someone pointed

this out to him. And so he got upset and posted this piece saying, why is Ted afraid of color blindness? Okay. And so the main pushback we got then was from people right of center who were outraged that this brilliant person, and Coleman is a brilliant person, was being suppressed by the woke, you know, Ted team. And, you know, I was told, you know, well, if you believe in Coleman and you want to champion him, fire your woke staff and so forth. And so there was, you know, as is common very smart centrist ideas, you know, articulately espoused by a very good person. But an alternative framing of it is Ted fought to bring to the stage someone who actually three or four years ago, five years ago, in the midst of the political

division that was there, we would never have invited to the stage. We brought him on. A lot of people in the community noticed and were excited that we were opening the tent wider than has been typical in recent years. And last time I checked, you know, that talk now has 800,000 views. It has been on the podcast, you know. So my own framing of it, Sam, is that Ted is on a, So I, my own framing of it, Sam, is that, is that Ted is on a, I think it's true that in the political, in the height of the sort of political division, when we did stuff that was political, most of it came from the progressive side of the equation. And, you know, we had talks with some of that language that I referred to that ends up being of all, just on the language, it is pointless having a talk about social justice if the people you want to persuade aren't going to hear it because of the language. And so we have to get the language said right. But more generally, TED is nonpartisan. And I feel strongly that there are people in the center and so forth who we need to listen to more and bring to TED. And I think when people see the lineup for TED24, they're going to realize that we are absolutely committed to a broader open tent. We're unafraid of controversy. And as well as ideas worth spreading, we're ideas worth debating. You often don't know whether an idea is worth spreading

in the current environment. You have to really hammer it out. So that's where I'm at right now. I've been a fan of Coleman for a long time. You know, I get why some people were upset by this talk. I think he's a brilliant thinker on issues outside race. When I've heard him, I've always been wowed. And I'm very glad he came to TED. And I think ultimately the story is TED, after a lot of internal debate, offers its platform to a voice who never would have been offered it a few years ago. Well, that's interesting. So my reaction to that is, I don't think it will surprise you. It may sound like a mere confession of my own bias here, but when I look at Coleman, who he is, and what he's said over the years and written, and as you say, he's quite brilliant.

He's quite inspiring. He was this prodigy that many of us were very happy to discover. I don't know how many years ago it was, but as an undergraduate at Columbia, he was writing really useful and beautiful essays that they were like arrows shot directly to the heart of our various social problems at that time. And quite uncharacteristically, of someone his age, he did not overwrite at all. I mean, it was really, it was quite beautiful. And yet, of course, for me to spell out his eloquence at length is considered a microaggression, given the color of his skin, among many people over there at TED. And so to hear your description of this was to hear the description of largely a pathology. I mean, for you to say that Coleman wouldn't have been invited

a few short years ago because of how controversial it would have been then, and his invitation this time around didn't escape controversy, as you just described. And when you look at what his talk was, his talk was just, as I said, truly anodyne. It was just this reboot of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that we get past the superficial characteristics that seem to divide us based on this insane obsession with race, and get to caring about people on the basis of their actual contributions to society and the content of their character, etc., etc., that was never controversial until it suddenly became controversial. And if the only issue was that we have learned in the intervening years that it simply doesn't work, you know, colorblindness, while it might sound ethically wonderful,

it's quixotic and it's ineffective and we need to make more muscular efforts to promote people even past their point of competence, right? Even just the kind of affirmative action that many people deride now. Let's say we want to make an argument for that. The thing that was so bizarre about the response Coleman received from, again, I don't know how many people at TED, was that his utterly straightforward and unemotional and, again, traditional civil rights talk was received as an attack, as an insult, as just pure opprobrium heaped on a vulnerable constituency, right? And these people perceive themselves to be under threat in the face of the least threatening guy and the least threatening message.

Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam. I get that response from you and I get why a lot of people see it that way. It does seem anodyne. It does seem obvious. So at the conference, there was a standing ovation for the talk from some people. Some people were really delighted. TED is a lot of different things, and some people were super delighted at the talk. I think the piece that you may have missed, and some of the people who think, oh, this is just obvious. I think you may have missed just how deep and complex this debate has become. There are people who have spent their whole lives, you know, fighting to address issues of racial injustice. And they have come to believe that straightforward colorblindness has not worked. It has not worked. And I don't think that

the alternative to that is just sort of tokenism of, you know, it's not necessarily affirmative action. It may well, there are many reasons why people of color may not be in a position to, let's say, apply for a job in the same numbers and in the same way as others, a color bold policy might well be just to look that much harder, to find the brilliant people. They may well be out there. And Sam, with respect, you yourself aren't always colorblind. I will bet anything that there are times when you look at your podcast lineup and say, I can't just have a lineup of white guys. You know, you feel that. I bet you feel that. No, actually, no. And that's- I don't believe you. I don't believe you.

No, no. I'll just be completely transparent to you. I mean, it's been pointed out to me that I don't have enough people of color, I don't have enough women, et cetera, et cetera. I don't have enough women, or et cetera, et cetera. And so I've heard that criticism. But the truth is, I simply reach out for the next topic of interest or the next person who's caught my attention. And obviously, I can't say that I'm colorblind because, and in my own life and for Coleman is to get to a place where no one cares that he's black. He doesn't have to care about it. I don't care about it. Of course, given our current situation, given the topic of this conversation, it is highly relevant that he's black for a host of reasons. First of all, had a white guy given that same talk, had I had guy given that same talk, had I had the temerity to come back and give a talk on colorblindness, you would have received

much more controversy and I would have received much less defense than Coleman did, purely but based on the color of our skins. And that makes no sense because the argument stands or falls on its merits. But I just think it's unfortunate, and it will soon become a travesty if a man of Coleman's intelligence has to spend all of his time, most of his time, even much of his time talking about race simply because he's black. He has so much more to contribute on so many other topics. It's a massive opportunity cost. And when I'm with Coleman, I very quickly forget that he's black because it doesn't matter

to me. It only matters to me when suddenly we're talking about this issue and I have to turn to him and say, listen, you have a superpower based on how you look. You should be doing something that I'm not doing over here. And that's a totally rational conversation to have with him. But I view it as an opportunity cost and I view it as something that we have to outgrow. I just think it's exactly, I mean, the heuristic here, and I'd be interested to know if you actually don't share this vision, if you actually don't share this vision, I hope that someday skin color is like hair color or eye color, right? Where we get to a place where no one would even think to ask how many blondes got into Harvard last year, right? Knowing how many green-eyed people are cardiologists and does it

perfectly match their representation in the rest of society? Who cares, right? We have to get to the who cares moment. That's what success will look like. And the people who reacted so badly to Coleman's talk are people who not only don't think we can get there fast enough by pretending to be colorblind, they don't even want to get there, apparently. They want to enshrine these differences among people as indelible, as true for all time, and as important for all time. And I just think that's the only other people who want to do that in our society are white supremacists, right? They have the same logic, and it's toxic. So it may be true that some people want that permanently, but I don't think that is the

general picture. And I think this is actually where we can find common ground. When I did a podcast interview with Melody Hobson, who'd made the argument against colorblindness, and I actually asked her this very question. I said, in the long term, do you dream of a world where race as an issue goes away and that we just relate to each other as individuals? And, you know, there was a long pause. And she said, that's incredibly hard to articulate for just because I see so many issues in the immediate term of why that approach isn't working. But long term, at least what I heard her say is that that is the

dream. And I think most of the people at TED who were upset by the talk, and I include a couple of close friends of mine, would absolutely say that long term, we want a colorblind society. That is the dream. And that in their view, the way to accelerate that is to look specifically at some of often controversial issues, and to not be owned by one tribe. tribe. And I think the tribalism is the biggest problem, Sam. It's the fact that so few people are willing to explore and live in the very uncomfortable space between the tribes. I think that actually most people in America, in Europe, in the world, are not at the extreme ends of the spectrum here. I think most people actually would, if they could find a way, like to embrace a more centrist position. The trouble is that if you put your head above the parapet, you get it blown off by both sides. One of the forms of generosity that I think is most important for the era that we're in is bridging. It's the ability and willingness to listen to people from the other tribe with respect and to try to understand them and to be willing to try to find language that can find common ground. If we don't find people who are willing to do that,

we're screwed. And so I think it's actually one of the most important forms of generosity that there is. I tell the story in the book of this African-American, Daryl Davis, who was puzzled why people hated him because of his skin color, you know, and invited the local leader of the Ku Klux Klan to a meeting, ended up forming a relationship with him. He went to KKK rallies, and they somehow built a friendship. This guy eventually left the KKK, and his story became widely reported and inspired many others. I mean, people like him, I think, are rare, modern heroes that we need so many more of. And it's just a very hard space to be in. I'm doing a terrible job of trying to be in that space, but I'm absolutely determined to try and be

in that space for Ted. We're going to get it wrong a lot of the time. We're going to be laughed at by people actually on both sides. But that's okay, because we have to be there. Ideas are supposed to be able to leap from one tribe to another. That's the whole reason they're powerful. And if we give up that connectivity, we're giving up one of humanity's most important superpowers. Yeah. Well, I applaud your efforts to continue that conversation and I encourage you to keep at it despite the pain it may cause you because this Middle East and the repute or disrepute with which our most important academic institutions are held. I mean, it's touching everything. And to my eye, many people are just very confused about the ethics and politics here. And there's some low-hanging fruit in terms of right answers that we can get our hands around. I happen to think Coleman is in possession of at least one there, but we're not going to resolve it here. I want to bend this conversation back to something that I know is closer to your heart at the moment, which is the topic of your book, generosity.

How do you think about generosity at this point? And how has the internet changed your thinking? Yeah, so there's two pieces really that came together for this. One is just the science of generosity, I think is actually really, really interesting. You know, my background was religious. And as I, one thing that kept me in the church for a long time was the belief that there was no basis for generosity or kindness or goodness or altruism outside a belief in God. I thought that outside that, what you had was an evolved animal that was evolved to survive, you know, that was evolved to survive and that there was no basis for conscience or for being kind to others. And it was the most thrilling discovery to realize that actually it was possible for selfish genes to evolve unselfish people, to build unselfish people. And that unselfishness was actually a brilliant way

of surviving if it could spread across a species. And there's scientific arguments about whether that was a group selection thing or individuals, quite how that worked. But the fact is that humans, along with several other species, have developed this as a kind of superpower. And it's that that has enabled basically everything that we've done by being the cooperating species that learned to, for example, share bounty of hunting or whatever back in the day and learned mechanisms for trust and belief in each other. It's that that I think is at the heart of everything that we have built. It's at the heart of civilization. So that's one piece that's cool. A second piece that is, again, biological is new evidence around just how wide we are to respond to generosity. I got this ringside view of a crazy experiment, called it the mystery experiment,

where 200 people on the internet were given $10,000 out of the blue, told no strings attached, you just have to tell us what you spend it on. And they ended up spending two-thirds of that money generously. Like, this is not, you know, what sort of the rational agent theory of economics would predict, I think. To be clear, this is 200 people getting $10,000 each, so $2 million. $2 million, yeah, that's right.

And I had the chance to speak with them after this experiment was done. So the experiment was done in partnership with Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia. They published on it. You know, it's the biggest experiment of this kind. You know, past experiments have been done where like psychology students were given 20 bucks and yeah, they tended to be generous with that. But the fact that this held across seven countries and different income levels and so forth, really surprising and kind of wonderful. It shows that there is this mechanism in there whereby ripple effects can happen from generosity.

There's a third biological piece that is the feeling we get when we see other people being generous. There's a sort of feeling of uplift that also increases levels of generosity. So put those things together with the fact that we're in this connected age now, and it's actually much easier to give away things that are hugely valuable to people at unlimited scale. So those ingredients in principle create a sort of playbook whereby acts of generosity could absolutely send ripples across the world in a great way. You've discovered this, by the way, in your own work here on this podcast. You used to write books and sell them and so forth. And you took a risk at some point and put all your time and effort into giving. I mean, people can support your podcast, but you will also give it away. And what you discovered was that

your impact on the world increased by at least an order of magnitude, I think. And I think, you know, okay, so that's, is that self-promotion or is that generosity? Well, it's both. And I think both are there. And I think your willingness to spend all this time, you know, offering reason and insight to so many people, I view that as a fantastic gift to the world that was not possible a couple of decades ago. And it's amazing that we're in a world where that can happen, where from your mind, we can get all this stuff and I can listen to you every week or whatever. I think that's incredible. There are so many examples of this under the radar that I think it's worth putting a label on it and trying to imagine how we tweak it and dial it up. And so the label I put on it is infectious generosity. And I think there's a pathway where it can allow us to reclaim the internet to being a force for good in the world and giving us at least a shot at a more hopeful future. We could talk about the various digital business models here and how

they interact with this concept of generosity, because it's, you know, I have had a fairly unique experience here, and so I'm happy to get into that if it's of interest. But to your first point about the common misunderstanding of our biological selfishness, right, the phrase, the selfish gene, which, you know, almost was almost an afterthought for, you know, I mean, Dawkins could have named it the immortal gene or the eternal gene, which almost was an afterthought. Dawkins could have named it the immortal gene or the eternal gene. I forget which he... I think the immortal gene was what he wished he had named it. But it doesn't mean that we're not capable of altruism, obviously, or selflessness even, and self-sacrifice. And there's an evolutionary rationale for why we would be from the gene's

eye view. I mean, there's kin selection and other properties of biology there. But on the psychological side, there's just this fact, which you point to, that generosity and even classic selflessness just feels good, right? Which is to say that caring about others is a very good strategy for caring about yourself, right? And so this opposition between selfishness and selflessness is fairly spurious. I mean, certainly as you climb the hierarchy of needs towards something like self-actualization, your actualization entails this capacity to genuinely care about other people and to genuinely love them and feel rewarded by your moral concern for them. And so there's just this thing that we might call wise selfishness, which contains all of the pro-social and even self-sacrificing attitudes and norms that we

would want it to and which are traditionally celebrated and championed under the banner of one or another religion. I mean, Buddhism is very articulate on this, but as is Christianity. And yet, this is not biologically mysterious, and it's not psychologically mysterious, and yet many people have drawn the opposite lesson that not only is selflessness and altruism and self-sacrifice, not only are those false norms, they're basically illusions, right? If you prick any one of those balloons, what you find in the middle of it is just pretension. You know, as I said at the top, just people are virtue signaling. They don't, you know, they're just, this is another way of being self-regarding. And you touch this a little bit in your book where you deal with the Kantian notion of the purity of one's motives with respect to generosity and then the necessity that they not be mixed I are going to agree is this false ideal of a moral purity that comes from Kant and elsewhere. I mean, there's also kind of the Christian notion here where, you know, you shouldn't be calling

attention to your acts of piety or your acts of generosity. Therefore, the best form of giving, I think many people, at least in our society, believe is almost by definition anonymous. If you're giving anonymously, well, then we know it's pure. But if you're giving in a way that calls attention to the giving, well, then there has to be a mixture of motive. But in my view, you actually can do much more good when you are candid about how important philanthropy is to you and how rewarding it is to you and how consequential it is in the world. And so just give me your take on all that. I think there's a simple mental shift that we all need to make, which is instead of looking for the bad in each other's motives, to look for the good.

As a philosophy student, I literally would lie on the floor of my room for hours at a time trying to figure this one out. I wanted to be a good person, but to be good without external motivation, to be purely good. I couldn't see how that happened. Like even if you were just trying to obey the call of conscience, wasn't it true that obeying the call of conscience in a sense felt good? And so wasn't that therefore in a way selfish? I think the truth is that generosity has always been, people have always done it for a reason. And there's always been a little bit of selfishness in the mix. Now, the amount of selfishness may vary in different people, but is it really, like if someone does something knowing secretly that it is in their long-term self-interest that if they do this, they're going to feel

deeply happy at the end of the day, or that it may actually enhance their reputation in the world. Is that a bad thing? No, it's not. We should embrace it. I think that one of the core things I argue for here is that we have to let go of this idea of perfect generosity.

It never was perfect. And in the modern era, there are actually more reasons than ever to look at the effects of generosity. Generosity is actually an amazing strategy for any person, any organization, any company. You give away stuff and incredible things can happen as a result. It can boost your reputation. I think rather than criticizing people for that, we should celebrate it because we want more of that. We don't want less of that. We want more of that. And so the simple shift of saying, just stop this ridiculous cynicism about someone's motives or trying to double guess.

Someone gives away money. Were they really doing this actually to enhance their reputation? That's not a bad thing. You know, it's good. It's good that they gave away the money for a good cause. Celebrate it and give other people permission to do it. Doing that, just that simple shift would unlock so much extra kindness because I think a lot of people are fearful of doing or certainly fearful of saying anything for precisely the reason that they're going to get shot at. It's crazy. It's really crazy. We've got to get past that and look at the world more realistically. And then just connected to that, and then just connected to that.

So, I mean, you said it was sort of kind of obvious in a way that, you know, giving, you know, can be good for you, can make you happy and so forth. I actually think for a lot of people, it's actually not that obvious. I think that the psychology around this is really quite confusing to me and quite weird because it's true that there are indelible,

profound links between generosity and happiness. But I think they're often hidden. And in the moment when we're thinking about being generous, what we're actually also aware of is the fear of loss. You know, loss aversion is a really powerful thing. And it's entirely possible for someone to go through a month without really thinking about opportunities to be kind because, you know, life is hard and that you're focused on our work or we're focused on, you know, how to get the,

you know, the next paycheck in or whatever it is. And those feelings are much more pressing, shall we say. And so part of, I think part of the playbook here, part of the life hack, And so I think part of the playbook here, part of the life hack, if you like, is to remind ourselves that actually if you take a gamble on being generous, you actually may not feel it with any certainty in the moment. But you can be pretty sure that afterwards you'll get payback. There will be a feeling of fulfillment. And even if there's no payback, if you like, from the people you gave things to, which there may be that as well, there will be payback and just, you know, the sort of feeling of, oh, I can be that person. Everyone at some level wants to be their better self, I think.

Yeah, well, I think we perhaps should linger on this point of the difference between intentions and results. I guess there and they all matter, but they matter differently. And I think it's important to optimize for all of them and just to be aware of the trade-offs here. This is one of the things that I, really the main thing that I found so valuable in effective altruism. I haven't, and we'll talk about the bad odor that surrounds this phrase now as a result of Sam Bankman Freed, but I've never formally considered myself an effective altruist because it's always seemed a little too online and a little too cultic and a little too shot through with Asperger's or something. But I've talked to the principal founders of it, Will McCaskill and Toby Ord and Peter Singer as well, and

admire those guys immensely. And the real contribution it's made to my own life is to differentiate these factors so that I can recognize that the reward I get from giving is separable from the results. And there are certain things I can give to where the results in the world are as good as they could possibly be, but it's just not that sexy a cause. And I don't find it that interesting or rewarding, frankly. It's not the thing that really tugs at my heartstrings. And so what I've decided to do is just optimize for results insofar as I can do that through people advising me and doing research, and then consider the good feels and the search for good feels to be an additional project that is, it's almost like a guilty pleasure. So I decided, I took their 10% pledge to give 10% of all pre-tax dollars to the most effective charities. And so I do that, but then I give more than that and I consider that, those gifts to the one person with a GoFundMe who has some truly tragic story, you know,

that wouldn't survive an EA analysis, but it's something that I really want to do. And the beautiful thing is that it has made it even more rewarding to do those things. Like, it's truly, it's almost like a noble form of greed that gets satisfied by helping people in those specific ways that fall outside of the optimized results analysis that come from an EA perspective. And then finally, intentions matter simply apart from the way in which they color our minds moment to moment and really dictate who we are in relation to other people. They matter just because, you know, if someone's giving, you know, to a cause simply to burnish their reputation, that's all they care about, and they don't really care about alleviating human

suffering or doing any other good in the world. Well, then, if that's what they care about, you can predict in the future that they are going to go, you know, they're going to be blown around by whatever incentives aim at burnishing their reputation, right? And they're not going to be reliable partners in the project of reducing human suffering because that's not what they care about. So that's why intention matters. But I just think we can keep all of those specific dials in view and tune them as correctly as we can so as to have both the best possible personal experience and also do the most good in the world. Yeah. So there's a lot there. I agree with you on the intention side. If you knew for certain sure that the only reason someone was doing something that looks generous was to burnish their reputation, then that doesn't really count as generosity. But we actually never know that.

But it's still good. It achieves good. If some sociopath is going to give you $100 million to build a hospital, you still get a hospital. You still get a hospital, but I don't think you have to describe that as generosity. But I think the truth is that in almost every circumstance, we don't know. I think people's intentions are almost always mixed. I think most people, their main focus is the giving away of the money in the hope that it will do something. And they're happy that their reputation may benefit as well, but it may not be the main driver. The point is, from the outside, you don't know.

And therefore, what business do we have to take the cynical view? I think it's really important just to look for the good in the intention rather than the bad. But in terms of what you were saying about, there's this really important dance, I think, between our generous instincts and our reasoned response to those instincts. I think the reason part is really important. Traditionally, people often, you know, when they give, it is on impulse. You know, you see there's some tragedy in the world and you think, oh, I must, you know, text in my contribution or whatever. And that feels good. Or we just, you know, we feel great empathy for someone close to us and they have a need and we'll support that.

Paul Bloom, you know, wrote this book Against Empathy, which was kind of trying to argue that too much of that is not, you know, doesn't get us where we need to go because there are so many resources in the world. It actually really is important that we spend them wisely. And so I think there's a really important dance that each of us has to do, which is to try to bring our reason to bear and to say, okay, I care about this. I care about this. Stop. Don't write a check right away. Just think for a minute. What is the most effective thing you can do? And that, you know, so to go to effective altruism, if you just ask the question, do we want our altruism to be effective? Well, yes, I think we do. You know, we'd like it to be smart. We'd like it to be reason-based. You know, we'd like the money to be spent wisely. You know, we'd like the money to be spent wisely. And that's why I'm with you on, you know, I've got huge respect for people like Will McCaskill and the other founders of Effective Altruism. I think if you view it as a journey, and I think Will would say this now about it, it's not any individual recommendation they make at any point in time is provisional. What they're anchored in is the desire to figure out what is a wise way to give. And when you put it that way, that is absolutely the right question to ask. What is a wise way? Because it's not obvious.

There are so many, you know, there's orders of magnitude difference between spending money smartly and spending it stupidly. And I think, you know, I talk a lot in the book about trying to find the leverage point. When you spend money, you're looking for what is it that makes this a good value for money? You know, can you leverage technology? Can you leverage government policy? Can you leverage the internet? Can you leverage education and knowledge. And I think when you find something that really, where you get, wow, that organization is being really smart about how they're spending their money. It's very exciting to do it. And I agree with you that it doesn't have the immediate feels of, you know, here's a family in need, you write them a check, they cry, you cry. Lovely. But there is actually something

satisfying deeply, I think, about taking the time to have a plan and to think about what you can afford to spend, to commit to spending it, and to getting it to a point where you feel good about it, I think really makes you feel different. I mean, I know, you know, I had a foundation and for years I couldn't figure out what to spend the money on that got me excited. Coming to TED, I suddenly found, wow, okay, I get this. I'm leveraging the power of ideas. I love that. I love that. And it didn't give me the kind of, here's a family crying and I can do something about it kind of feels, but it gave me a different kind of satisfaction to have found what was for me the right way of spending the foundation's money. So that's the dance I think is start with the biological instinct and the sort of the realization that for you to feel good about yourself, you know, generosity should be part of who you are, but then take the time to think it through and figure it out. What is the wise way to go? Because there are just such different answers to that. you at TED have a fairly unique one, and there are actually some similarities between the two, and I just would love to get your take on this. So originally on the podcast, I had the NPR, PBS,

Patreon-style business where it was free for everyone to listen to it. People expect podcasts to be free. And for a variety of reasons, I didn't want to take ads. So I just said, if you enjoy what is happening over here, you can support it and here's how. And I think I was very successful in doing that. And it was a, you know, a real business and it was quite stable. And I had about probably two years of running it that way where it was just, I mean, the income was perfectly reliable. I mean, maybe it moved around by two or three percent on any given month, but it just seemed completely, I had found the floor and the ceiling, and it was just humming along. And nothing seemed broken about it, except for two things. One, I released my meditation app alongside this podcast, and that was structured differently. That was an app in the App Store, and it was paywalled. I mean,

you could use it for free for some time, but then you had to subscribe. And if you couldn't afford it, you could just send an email and we would give it to you for free. And that's still the case, and it's still the case on this podcast. But I had these two experiments in business running side by side. One had a paywall and one was sort of opt out and one was opt in, right? And it was really just MP3 files on both platforms. And I noticed that by comparison with the app, the podcast business was broken. And I didn't do anything about it until I stumbled upon a conversation on Reddit, which truly bowled me over. And I think you might find this interesting because this revealed to me that as a business model, there's something wrong with the spirit

of generosity and the spirit of philanthropy. Because I spectated upon this, so the thread was something around, do you support Sam's podcast? And if so, why or why not? And someone said, well, I would support the podcast if I knew what he was going to do with the money. And another person said, well, I would support the podcast if I knew how much it costs to run a podcast. And another person said, I would support the podcast if I knew how much I thought a person should earn from a podcast. And I looked at those three statements and my head practically fell off my shoulders because I realized at a glance there was something deeply wrong here because these are the kinds of considerations that would never have occurred to a person when they were thinking about buying my next book, for instance.

I mean, there's literally no person on earth who's ever thought the thought, well, I would buy his next book if I knew how much I thought an author should make from writing books. Or I would buy his next book if I knew what he was going to do with the money. These are just not the kinds of thoughts people think. Either you want to read the book or you don't, and you buy it or not. And so I decided to make the podcast emulate the app in that I made the paywall compulsory in that it's now paywalled. And if you're not behind the paywall, you're only hearing the first part of every podcast. But if you can't afford it, you just have to send an email and we give it to you for free. And I staff literally full-time something like 30 or 35 people in the customer service and 95% of what they do is just minister to free accounts. And there were days

during COVID where a thousand people would send that email a day, right? And many hundreds send that email on any given day for the app or the podcast or both, and that's fine. So I'm very committed to money never being the reason why someone can't get access to what I'm doing because it's important that that not be the reason. And it being a digital product allows for that. But the crucial thing to realize here is that when I changed the paywall on the podcast, first of all, when I announced that I was going to do this, many people predicted that it was going to be a disaster, that my audience would shrink to nothing, and that no one would pay because everyone expects podcasts to be free. Unlike apps, everyone expects podcasts to be free. And most of them are.

Most of them are ad-supported. And what happened was that literally... If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of The Making Sense Podcast. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program.

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